Peitho. Examina Antiqua
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Platońska eudajmonia. Autor Politei o życiu szczęśliwym
Full text linkThe article deals with several issues related to the concept of happiness that emerge from Plato’s triptych: the Gorgias, the Republic and the Laws. The focus is on (1) the question of the alleged overcoming of the eudaimonistic imperative, i.e., natural human pursuit of happiness, in the didactic message of the Republic; (2) the question of to what extent the path of cognition ending in the contemplation of the perfect being is at the same time a strive for the supreme happiness; (3) the dilemma of choosing between a reductive and a cumulative model of complete satisfaction in human life; and finally (4) the problem of affiliative conditions of full life satisfaction
The Figure of Socrates in Numenius of Apamea: Theology, Platonism, and Pythagoreanism (fr. 24 des Places)
Full text linkNumenius is one of the most important authors who, in the Imperial Age, deal with the figure of Socrates. Socrates is important in the Platonic tradition, in particular in the sceptical tradition, when the Socratic dubitative “spirit” of the first Platonic dialogues became important to justify the “suspension of judgement.” Numenius criticises the whole Academic tradition by saying that the Academics (particularly the sceptics) betrayed the original doctrine of Plato and formulated a new image of Socrates. For Numenius, Socrates plays a central role because Plato would have inherited his doctrine. What does Socrates’s doctrine consist in? According to Numenius, Socrates theorised a “doctrine of three Gods” (which can be likely found in the second Platonic epistle) which is strictly bound up with the main aspect of Plato’s thought. In fact, in Numenius’s view, Plato belongs to a genealogy which can be linked to Pythagoras himself. From this perspective, Numenius says that Socrates’s original thought is a theology which also belongs to the Pythagorean tradition and which Plato further developed. For Numenius, Socrates is not the philosopher of doubt, but a theologian who first theorised the existence of three levels of reality (Gods), which is also the kernel of Numenius’s metaphysical system. For this reason, Numenius puts Socrates within a theological genealogy that begins with Pythagoras and continues with Socrates and Plato, and that the Academics and the Socratics failed to understand
Alētheia in Gorgias of Leontini. An Excerpt from the History of Truth
Full text linkIt is often assumed that the concept of alētheia, or ‘truth’, in Gorgias of Leontini belongs to the art of rhetoric. Along these lines, it is usually understood as an aesthetic concept or even a mere ‘adornment’ of speech. In this paper, it is argued, by contrast, that Gorgianic alētheia is a definable criterion of speech figuring in the practice of moral education. While the ‘truth’ of a logos indeed has to be assessed on aesthetic grounds, the underlying concept of alētheia is predominantly ethical. For Gorgias, speech is ‘true’ when it promotes virtue (aretē) by being expressive of virtue. The principle stated in the opening passage of the Encomium of Helen, that a speaker has ‘to praise what is praiseworthy and to blame what is blameworthy’, explains precisely this understanding of alētheia
Truth in Practical Reason: Practical and Assertoric Truth in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics
Full text linkTruth has always been a controversial subject in Aristotelian scholarship. In most cases, including some well-known passages in the Categories, De Interpretatione and Metaphysics, Aristotle uses the predicate ‘true’ for assertions, although exceptions are many and impossible to ignore. One of the most complicated cases is the concept of practical truth in the sixth book of Nicomachean Ethics: its entanglement with action and desire raises doubts about the possibility of its inclusion to the propositional model of truth. Nevertheless, in one of the most extensive studies on the subject, C. Olfert has tried to show that this is not only possible but also necessary. In this paper, we explain why trying to fit practical truth into the propositional model comes with insurmountable problems. In order to overcome these problems, we focus on multiple aspects of practical syllogism and correlate them with Aristotle’s account of desire, happiness and the good. Identifying the role of such concepts in the specific steps of practical reasoning, we reach the conclusion that practical truth is best explained as the culmination of a well-executed practical syllogism taken as a whole, which ultimately explains why this type of syllogism demands a different approach and a different kind of truth than the theoretical one
Eleatic Ontology in Aristotle: Introduction
Full text linkThe introduction summarizes the six new papers collected in Volume 1, Tome 5: Eleatic Ontology and Aristotle. The papers take a fresh look at virtually every aspect of Aristotle’s engagement with Eleaticism. They are particularly concerned with Aristotle’s responses to Parmenidean monism, the Eleatic rejection of change, and Zeno’s paradoxes. The contributions also focus on the ways in which Aristotle developed several of his own theories in metaphysics and natural science partly in reaction to Eleatic puzzles and arguments
Monism in Aristotle’s Metaphysics I.3–5
Full text linkScholars have often seen Parmenides as entirely opposed to earlier materialistic philosophy. In this paper I argue that what is more striking in Aristotle’s Metaphysics Book I is the degree of continuity that he sees between Parmenides and the material monists. I explore this coupling of Parmenides with the material monists to understand better what he takes to be distinctive and problematic with Parmenides’ monism
Aristotle, Eleaticism, and Zeno’s Grains of Millet
Full text linkThis paper explores how Aristotle rejects some Eleatic tenets in general and some of Zeno’s views in particular that apparently threaten the Aristotelian “science of nature.” According to Zeno, it is impossible for a thing to traverse what is infinite or to come in contact with infinite things in a finite time. Aristotle takes the Zenonian view to be wrong by resorting to his distinction between potentiality and actuality and to his theory of mathematical proportions as applied to the motive power and the moved object (Ph. VII.5). He states that some minimal parts of certain magnitudes (i.e., continuous quantities) are perceived, but only in potentiality, not in actuality. This being so, Zeno’s view that a single grain of millet makes no sound on falling, but a thousand grains make a sound must be rejected. If Zeno’s paradoxes were true, there would be no motion, but if there is no motion, there is no nature, and hence, there cannot be a science of nature. What Aristotle noted in the millet seed paradox, I hold, is that it apparently casts doubt on his theory of mathematical proportions, i.e., the theory of proportions that holds between the moving power and the object moved, and the extent of the change and the time taken. This approach explains why Aristotle establishes an analogy between the millet seed paradox, on the one hand, and the argument of the stone being worn away by the drop of water (Ph. 253b15–16) and the hauled ship, on the other
Aristotle’s Mixture in its Medical and Philosophical Background: The Hippocratic De victu and the Aristotelian De generatione et corruptione
Full text linkAristotle’s notion of qualitative interaction ruling both the process of mixture and the process of reciprocal elemental transmutation is based upon the idea of a physical contrariety endowed with two extremes and a wide central area where the opposite forces reach different equilibrium points (i.e., the so-called mixtures) or can be present to the fullest degree (in this case we do not have a mixture, but an element). Differently from previous scholarship which attributes this notion specifically to Aristotle, we have found, in a text which Aristotle seems to have been acquainted with, the Hippocratic De victu, an incipient structure of a contrariety endowed with extremes and a central area where opposite forces meet and yield respective equilibrium points, mixtures, which, as in Aristotle, give an account of the variety of beings existing in the world. In this article, we suggest the possibility that in the development of the Aristotelian thinking about elemental and qualitative dynamics, the Hippocratic De victu may have contributed to suggesting to Aristotle a way of envisioning the structure of his basic physical contrarieties
Bycie – nie bycie, prawda – fałsz w koncepcji Arystotelesa
Full text linkThe basis of Aristotle’s arguments about truth and falsity is formulated syntactically according to the distinctions of ‘to be’ as the predicative affirmation - composition and, correspondingly, ‘not to be’ as negation – separation. As the nominal defining characteristic of falsity is contradiction, so of truth is non-contradiction. The expression of truth or falsity in the declarative sentence of affirmation or negation is a function of thinking as a human cognitive disposition under the semantic figures of categorical predication. In addition, we cite Aristotle’s more important texts on the true intellection of non-composites (indivisibles), the investigation of truth and probability, the diagnosis of falsehood, the truthfulness and lying. Finally, a mention of modern adaptations of Aristotle’s concept of truth
An Ontology for the In-Between of Motion: Aristotle’s Reaction to Zeno’s Arguments
Full text linkThis paper proposes an interpretation of Books V and VI of Aristotle’s Physics as being (at least partly) a reaction to Zeno’s four “arguments against motion” that Aristotle expounds and discusses in Phys. VI 9. On the basis of a detailed textual analysis of that chapter, I show that Zeno’s arguments rest on a frame of a priori notions such as part and whole, in contact, between, limit, etc., which Aristotle takes over in order to account for the inner structure (here called “the In-Between”) common to all facts of motion and change. That frame allows him to develop a specific ontology for that inner structure – although it exists only potentially according to the Aristotelian orthodoxy – because he needs such an ontology in order to vindicate the reality of motion and change